


Tripping Around in Someone Else's Home

by JRaylin441



Series: Prequels [1]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Dissociation, Gen, I get a little too into science for just a bit, Millport, Neil Josten character study, Panic Attacks, So I wrote this to figure it out, The world (me) needed to know, Why is Exy so important to Neil?, greif, identity crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-18 20:29:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20645225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JRaylin441/pseuds/JRaylin441
Summary: Neil was nothing, when you really got down to the core of him. He had traits and thoughts and interests and likes and dislikes and even a personality, but if you cut through all of that to see what was driving it all, there was nothing but wind howling through an empty cavern. Deep, deep inside him, there was nothing left. He and his mother had taken each and every thing that might have lived there at one time and systematically ground them into dust. And then they burned the dust.Neil moves to Millport and finds a way to live and carry on now that he doesn't have his mother. Neil finds Exy.





	Tripping Around in Someone Else's Home

**Author's Note:**

> I know that it has been literal years since I've written anything, and while the dream return would be with FMA, I had inspiration for the first time in a while and figured I'd run with it before it left. In that same vein, there are likely some typos in here, after only one round of editing, but I don't know that I would keep the motivation to publish if I kept editing. Let me know if you see anything that needs fixed (or if you want to be a beta, lol).
> 
> I want to write some stuff for AFTG, but I figured I should spend some time figuring out Neil before I tried to write anything else. I didn't really get his complete obsession with Exy and his insistence that he was nothing, so I thought I'd figure it out. I'm planning to do some similar stuff for the other characters, so I can figure out what I'm working with before I write anything else.
> 
> Enjoy! I would apologize for the angst but y'all should know better at this point.
> 
> Title from Ghosts by Head and the Heart

Neil had been in Millport for eight days. His mother had been dead for 39 days, 4 hours, and 11 minutes. He felt each second slipping by in his mind, and he couldn’t do anything to make them stop. He had a watch strapped to his wrist that he’d picked up at a trucker stop somewhere on his month-long fugue state and switched for his old one.

Aiden had been the type of boy to wear nice-looking watches, with a leather band. Not too nice, just enough to blend in and match his studious personality. Neil, on the other hand, was a runner. He had a cheap, shitty athletic watch.

Neil loved watches, a trait he shared with most of the past 22 boys. He loved having _something_ in his life with a structure to it. When every other part of his identity was constantly shifting, changing, altering itself. When his main goal in life was to erase any evidence of ever existing, time was one thing that remained consistent across the world. Sure, time zones switched, and days were shorter or longer, but months and days and years were the same. It was structure. It was something. It was a scaffolding that he could construct the timeline of his life around.

Eight days since arriving in Millport. Thirty-nine days since his mother died. Three weeks in Seattle after running from Canada. Seven years since they’d left his father’s home.

Neil was nothing, when you really got down to the core of him. He had traits and thoughts and interests and likes and dislikes and even a personality, but if you cut through all of that to see what was driving it all, there was nothing but wind howling through an empty cavern. Deep, deep inside him, there was nothing left. He and his mother had taken each and every thing that might have lived there at one time and systematically ground them into dust. And then they burned the dust.

Or, at least, that was how it felt sometimes. Usually, when he got to the point that it felt like this, it would be late at night, and he would wake his mother up so she could drive him to an outdoor track. Then she’d sit on the bleachers or the grass on the side of the track and let him run himself to exhaustion while she spent more time studying local culture.

For the last thirty-nine days, it had been less a question of when he did feel like this, and more a question of when _didn’t_ he.

This was part of the reason he’d decided that Neil Josten was a runner. The first two days after burning his mother’s body (don’t think about the pull of bloody skin against car seats), Aiden had walked through the back streets of beach towns. He needed to get far away from there before stealing a car. If someone found his mother’s bones, if someone found some evidence that they had been there, he didn’t want to leave a clear trail of car theft for his father to follow.

When just walking felt like it wasn’t enough, when he felt the prickle of eyes on his skin, when he thought he would leap out of his skin every time he heard a noise, Aiden would run. Not sprinting, like he would do with his mother at night, but the steady, pavement-slapping jog that he could maintain for hours. No one would question it if they saw. Just another pedestrian, out for a run. The duffel bag on his back was a little strange, but not remarkable enough to be worth noting.

When he felt like he was far enough away or, more accurately, when he felt like he was going to shake into the next dimension if he didn’t get away from California, Aiden headed toward a suburb and stole the first car he found that would pass through the streets discretely.

When he drove past what looked to be a fairly busy truck stop, just after sunset, he took note of it and kept driving. A few miles down, he pulled off to the side of the road and slept in the back seat. He only snatched three hours or so before his brain startled at some noise and jerked him back to consciousness. He ditched the car, leaving the hazards on, and jogged back to the truck stop.

After paying for a shower and changing into different clothes, Aiden checked his smile in the mirror. It looked manic and strained. He scrubbed the lingering blood out from under his nails and splashed cold water on his face. Aiden reached inside and grabbed the panic by its throat. He choked it and shoved it down until the frantic pace of his heart started to slow. There wasn’t time for a breakdown or panic, and someone having an anxiety attack drew the eye and caught in someone’s memory better than little else.

Aiden checked his smile again, and it looked calm and charming and a little self-depreciating. He headed out.

Aiden the sociology major took a few tries before he found someone willing to give him a ride, but it was worth it to find his way out onto a main road. As the familiar sensation of flying down a highway from a passenger seat sunk into his bones, he felt the prickling on his neck ease, for the first time in two days and seven hours.

He was Aiden, and then he was Zack, and then Sam, then Tyler, then Will. Short names that slipped in one ear and out the other and were forgotten as soon as he said them. He was in California, and then he was in Nevada, then Idaho, then Utah, then Arizona. He stopped for a couple of days in each state. He’d sleep on park benches and in the back seats of cars. Then he’d move along.

In Idaho, Sam bleached his hair in a gas station bathroom. The old, dishwater blond faded to white-yellow. In Utah, Will dyed it a brown so dark that it was almost black. He also took a few days to wander around and decide on a more permanent identity. He found a phone book and used it to pick a last name. He ordered a rush delivery of colored contacts. Finally, he showed up at one of his mother’s old contacts and got his new identity made “official”.

Neil was a quiet kid who didn’t like to pick fights. His parents were never home, but he got along with them fine. He liked to go for runs and read books. His favorite football team was the New Orleans Saints, and he didn’t know anything about Exy. He didn’t have any strong opinions about Exy. This was one thing that all 22 boys had had in common.

Ten days ago, Neil Josten had used the sociology major lie one last time to hitch a ride to Phoenix. He’d spent the last few rides testing out the edges of Neil Josten. The notes he pretended to take on the truckers ended up being a list of details he learned about himself as the truckers asked him questions. He picked out a bland, Midwestern accent to match the ones of those around him and waited to see if anyone asked him where his accent was from. When no one did, he settled more firmly into it and built a little home for himself there in the clear “r”s and short vowels.

When he arrived in Millport, he’d initially planned to stop there for the night. Walking down the street, though, he felt multiple eyes on him. He wanted to crawl out of his skin and felt like jumping at every noise.

He didn’t, though. Jump, that is. It drew attention when you did that.

Neil stopped to get a sandwich from a small-town market before leaving, and the man behind the register asked him if he was that new kid everyone said showed up yesterday. For a moment, his heart battered against his ribs and made a bid to escape his chest altogether. But. This wasn’t malicious stalking, like he was constantly afraid of and constantly looking for. This was news of him showing up in a new town coming back around to him in less than a day. He was getting news of a new arrival fifteen hours after the arrival occurred.

He was used to having his mother at his side, always. He was used to sleeping back-to-back with another person whom he could trust to be at least as paranoid as himself. The only time Mary allowed him out of her sight was when he had to go to school, and the second he got back, she would check him over. Neil had accepted that he would never have that again, but maybe this could be useful. Maybe this small-town gossip mill would get word of anyone else arriving to him before the person themselves did.

Neil Josten found an abandoned house in the outskirts of town and had already broken in before he realized that he had decided to stay. Figuring that this place might be as good as any, he shoved a wadded-up shirt under his head, gripped his gun to hold under the shirt, and fell asleep on the floor, with his back against the wall and his eyes turned toward the front door.

He woke up again just as the sun was going down. Normally, his mother would want him to sit in the dark for the first night and listen to the house, to make sure he knew the noises it made in the night. It was imperative that he be able to sleep through the house’s noises at night. Even more important, he needed to immediately wake up when he heard a noise that didn’t belong.

After a minute of sitting in the dark, Neil became painfully aware of the empty space at his side, where his mother would usually sit. He heard the creak of the house, and his heart kicked up a fit in response. It wasn’t the sound of a person stepping on a creaky floorboard or opening a door. It was the way a house sounded as it shifted in the cooler air of the night. More similar to the moan of the wind than a person’s presence. More similar to the sound bloody flesh made when you tried to tear it off-

Neil shot to his feet and started to walk around the interior walls of the house. He needed to learn the lines of it anyway, and at least this way he was able to keep moving. If someone came for him in the night, there would be no one there for make the excuse that it was dark, and that he didn’t know all the halls of the house. He would just be dead. He needed to be able to navigate this house blindfolded.

He walked the rooms of the house five times over, but he couldn’t stop hearing the sound his mother’s corpse had made as he tried to pull it out of the car. When it got to be too much, he threw on a shirt and his old, worn-down sneakers, and bolted out the door. This wasn’t the steady jog of a month ago. This was the gasping, desperate sprint of someone trying to outrun the thoughts in his own head.

He ran until he couldn’t hear anything over the gasping of his breath, and there were no thoughts left to fit into his head. And he kept running after that, desperately trying to ignore the ache in his legs. Ignoring the howl of the wind he felt, buffeting inside his chest.

Mary’s ghost was just there, just in the corner of his eye. If he turned his head, he would see her, reading some book or scrolling on her laptop. Her foot would be tapping with impatience as she waited for him to “get his head on straight”. But when he looked, she wasn’t there. She wasn’t watching him exhaust himself on the track. Not a single person alive knew where he was. No one dead knew either. And no one knew who Neil Josten was. He could die tomorrow, and no one would know enough to notice. It wouldn’t even be a real person who had died. Just a wisp of smoke in the chest of a costume shaped like a boy.

* * *

The next day, he sat on the floor of the house and did not leave, no matter what thoughts tried to force their way into his head. He used the page of a notebook to pin down all of the details of Neil Josten’s life. When he was done, he pinned it to the wall above where his shirt was wadded as a pillow and read it as many times as his tired eyes could stand.

When his eyes fell shut, he said the words out loud.

* * *

The next day, Neil threw out all of his old clothes and bought new ones at a thrift store in town.

* * *

The next day was a Friday, and he enrolled himself in the high school nearby. It was easy enough, since Neil Josten was already a legal adult. He fed the staff his carefully-crafted backstory and then went home.

* * *

Saturday, he sat in front of the paper and read it until he couldn’t anymore. That night, he ran until he thought he might be able to sleep.

* * *

Sunday, Neil Josten burned the paper. When he smelled the smoke, he went outside and threw up stomach acid and canned green beans onto the simmering concrete of the back patio.

* * *

Neil had been in Millport for eight days, and he was just getting out of his last class on his first day of school. It had been a normal first day at a new school, because Neil had done this 22 times and he knew how to make a normal first day at school happen. He introduced himself in every class when the teachers asked him to and gave fun facts like “I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon”, “I’ve never eaten a Toaster Strudel”, and “This is my first time moving”. He was a bland person who liked to go on runs and read books. His favorite football team was the Saints and he didn’t care about Exy.

What he _did _care about what the fact that it was 3 p.m., and he had nowhere he needed to be, nothing to do, and no one to talk to until 7 a.m. the next morning.

This wasn’t an entirely new occurrence. It wasn’t like he’d had friends any time before this or been allowed to participate in any remarkable hobbies. Still, he was headed home after his first day at a new school. His mother would want him to recount the whole day to her, so that she could pick through it and look for any hint of suspicious activity. She would have spent the days collecting books and compiling research at the library to learn about what local culture was like, and after she was done searching through his day like she was looking for a needle in a haystack, she would quiz Neil on local culture as she warmed up a can of something to eat over their camp stove.

They would be talking with whatever accent their current personas had, and any time he slipped up, he would get smacked with her empty hand or whatever was in it at the time. Same went for any time he messed up on local culture. There was no avoiding being the new kid, but they would move heaven and earth to avoid being seen as exotic, or interesting, or notable in any way.

It wasn’t normal, probably. No, it definitely wasn’t. But it was what home had felt like for the last seven years.

He’d hated his mother, with the kind of slow burn of a hearth fire that never went out. He’d hated that she never let him out of her sight, that he felt her fingers digging claws into his arm whenever his heart started to race, that she’d never let a single one of his personas play Exy. He hated that she didn’t let him have friends. He hated the way she would hiss directly into his ear when he did something eye-catching in public, and it was always too loud and too close, but he wasn’t allowed to flinch away. He hated that when he tried to talk about things like watches and time and math, she would hit him over the head and tell him to shut the fuck up before she did it for him. Normal kids didn’t like stuff like that, and they’d already decided on what his current persona liked.

They were meant to be the kind of people who entered a town and left without catching a single person’s notice. There could be no one to miss them. She’d made them both into ghosts, and then she’d fucking died anyway and left him here, without the single person who had ever made him feel substantial.

Neil Josten felt the yawning cave of emptiness that lived in the core of him, reaching up to swallow him whole.

He decided to go to the library. His house didn’t have electricity, so he needed to get all of his homework done before the sun went down, and he needed access to a computer for some of it.

* * *

The ninth day in Millport. Neil got up early and went to class. He stayed at the library after school to do his homework. He went on a long run until it was fully dark, and then he snuck into someone’s backyard to use their hose to rinse all the sweat off his body. He drip-dried on his way back to his house and stripped down after sneaking in. He hung the wet clothes up over a door so that they could dry. He’d shower with soap after gym class tomorrow.

Neil laid on the floor of his house, gun gripped tight under his shirt pillow, and recited the facts about Neil’s life in every language he knew until he fell asleep.

* * *

Day ten. Neil went to class. He did his homework at the library. He went on a run, rinsed off, and laid on the floor of his house until he fell asleep.

* * *

Day eleven. Class. Library. Run. Rinse. Sleep.

* * *

Day twelve. Class. Homework. Run. Sleep.

* * *

On his thirteenth day in Millport, Neil Josten woke up and realized that he hadn’t accounted for the weekend. He laid on the floor and stared at the ceiling for a few hours, flicking the safety on and off on his gun, just to hear the click echo around the empty room.

He tried to make his head completely empty. When it got too hard to do that, when he was spending all his energy focusing on the noise of the gun to not hear the peeling of skin inside his head, he got up and went for a run. He ran until it was almost dark again, until his knees felt like they’d turned to Jello, and then stopped in the same little market from his second day to get another sandwich. He ate it on a picnic table in the park, because he didn’t want to go back to his house yet.

He didn’t want to sit in the dim rooms, where the Arizona air could get stiflingly hot and there weren’t any noises beyond the ones that the house made and the ones he added when he couldn’t take it anymore. At least here he could feel the heat of the sun as it beat down on his skin, he could feel the beginning of a sunburn forming. That was something. He could hear a family nearby, playing in the sun. That was another thing. Out here, people might look over and see him sitting at the table, and for a moment they might notice that he was there. He had designed Neil Josten to pass beneath the radar, but at least if someone was looking at him, he _existed_. If he entered a single person’s mind, then they might notice if he died right then.

In his physics class, they were studying light. The teacher had gone on about how particles of light were both waves and particles, but just the act of observing them forced them to behave like particles, instead of waves. They were shifting and both at once and neither until someone looked at them, and then it was like they snapped into one form. That’s what he was. He was light particles. Unless someone was watching him, then he was constantly shifting and changing and impossible to pin down. It was observation that made him real.

Neil was alone. He knew that was best, and it wasn’t like he was about to try and change it. But the howling emptiness inside him was getting louder and louder by the day. When no one was looking or noticing him, he didn’t have to pretend to be Neil, but there wasn’t anything left underneath him. There was nothing else for him to be.

He felt like if he opened his mouth too wide at the wrong moment, the wind could sweep in and whisk away any tendrils of smoke inside him that made up the person below Neil Josten. He felt an irrational urge to press his lips tightly together, so that whatever he had managed to retain of a true identity, whatever was left under 22 identities, 22 fake names and hair colors, under four languages, whatever that was, it wouldn’t accidentally slip out of him, and leave him to be just an empty husk.

Neil stopped himself from randomly pressing his lips together. He could feel his mother’s sharp pinch on his leg, because holding your lips together all the time was not something that normal people do. But, fuck it, no one was watching him. No one was close enough to even see the difference, and his mother was just a backpack of bones in the sand. Neil pressed his lips together and bit them closed, his jaw locked so tightly that he tasted blood.

That was the problem. Deep down under it all, Neil Josten wasn’t anything at all. He was nothing. Dig underneath the skin to look for secrets or depth and you would just find a vacuum.

He was finished with his sandwich, but he sat on the bench for a while longer, until the sun had burned his nose to a rosy red.

* * *

Sunday morning, Neil didn’t get off the floor. He didn’t in the afternoon, either. Instead, he laid on his wadded-up shirt, feeling the itchy burn of the carpet against his sunburns and staring at the ceiling. It wasn’t like the last few times he’d sat in silence, where his mind shouted at him until he had to run. Now, Neil stared up and thought about nothing at all. He was nothing and his thoughts were nothing and he was nothing to anyone else in the world.

He probably drifted in and out of sleep. He must have. For once, he wasn’t aware of the time, but he knew that he would blink and the shadows in the house would change. He wasn’t really aware of anything he did that day, only that at one point he came into awareness and realized that it was dark outside.

That night, he tried to fall asleep, but his brain wouldn’t let him. He just kept staring at the ceiling until 4 a.m., when he realized that he wasn’t going to be getting any rest. He hauled himself off the carpet and took his aching, sunburnt body on a run.

He was ready for school to start again, because it was eight hours a day where he was interacting with people, where people were seeing him, and he was forced to be light particles instead of some quantum mystery. Eight hours a day where he could focus so hard on being Neil Josten, being _normal_, that he wouldn’t have time to worry about whether or not he was real. His mother would beat him if she saw him acting excited to go to school on a Monday, but she was dead.

The school opened its doors at six, but classes didn’t start until 7:15, so Neil was hoping to be able to sneak in and use the locker room showers before classes started. Otherwise, he would just be sweaty. It was better than being back in that empty house.

* * *

School was…not what he’d been expecting. He had hoped that being back in the swing of a routine would help him feel real again, but something about the weekend seemed to have metastasized to his lungs. He felt like he was moving through water, unable to get a deep breath in. Neil moved through the halls and felt like, if someone had tried to walk through him, there would have been no resistance.

It was like everyone in the school was on one plane of existence and he was on a completely separate one. He felt transparent. He felt removed and empty. Only one week at a new school in a small town, and no one turned to look at him as he went past.

He was nothing.

* * *

That night, Neil laid on his wadded-up shirt and clutched his gun and tried to list off the things about him that were real.

He didn’t like vegetables. That was one. Although, once his mother had made it so that Stefan loved them. It had been a horrible few months.

Running couldn’t go on the list. Running wasn’t an interest or a like or a desire. Running was the one time when he didn’t have to pretend. It was the one way that he could stand further than ten feet away from his mother. Running was the thing that made his mind quiet. When his temper flared up, or he and his mother fought, or he just got to the point where living ten feet away from the same person for years made him feel like he was going to explode, his mother would drive him to the track. She would tell him to run until he was too tired to make any more of his shit her problem. Anger was noticeable. Fighting or tension got in the way of survival. Emptiness was better, and if he ran for long enough, even that went away.

Exy.

Exy was complicated. It was one of his few fond memories of childhood. One of the few times he’d seen his mother smile. And he was pretty sure it was what had led to his father killing that man in front of him and his mom taking him to run.

If he could have picked a life for himself, it would have involved playing Exy for as long as possible. He had a whole binder dedicated to the other two boys who had been there as his father cut a man into a million little pieces. Neil didn’t think he would ever know what had been going on that day, but somehow he had left the incident with an identity to erase while the two others had been catapulted into Exy stardom. Kevin and Riko had left that room with everything he had ever wanted, and Neil had left it to become someone without wants. Neil had left that room to turn into nothing at all. No desires. No personality.

He wanted to find Kevin and Riko and _rip _their talent from them. The thing that had ruined him seemed like it hadn’t affected them at all. They were living the life he would dream for himself, and he had been right fucking there in the same room as them, at the same age, at a similar talent level. They were friends and then he was nothing and they were _everything_.

At this point, he had written and rewritten who he was so many times that there was nothing left to be sure of. Except for Exy. Exy was something his mother hadn’t been able to make him give up. Whatever the echoing hole in his chest held, it was shaped like an Exy racket.

Neil didn’t care about Exy. But cut down deep to the core of him, to whoever lived deep down, whether it was Nathaniel or some chimeric combination of all 22 boys he’d been, he liked Exy. He didn’t like vegetables, and he liked Exy.

And why was he staying away? One persona out of 22 could like Exy. His mother had steered him away because it was a similarity to his past, but what was the worst that could happen? His father could find him and kill him, sure, but right now he wasn’t sure there was anything left in him _to_ kill. The life he was living right now could be done by a robot just as well. If he was killed, there was not a single person who would notice or care.

Neil didn’t want to die. Of course he didn’t. His mother had beat and stomped out anything in him that might have ever led him to think it. But whatever he was doing right now certainly wasn’t living.

His mother was dead. She’d had a life mission to escape his father, and she’d fucking failed, and he was still alive. Sort of. But whatever his life right now was, if he kept on like this, he was never going to leave Millport. He was going to forget how to think or run or breathe or exist at all. Beneath the crushing weight of his mother’s death, Neil didn’t think he would be able to keep his mind together. It had just been one person, but he couldn’t continue with no one knowing he existed, no one talking to him, and nothing to do.

Why couldn’t Neil Josten play Exy? There was no one left to stop him.

What could the harm in it be?

* * *

**Coda:**

“You can love Exy all you want, but it’s never gonna love you back.” Nicky was staring at him, eyes wide like he was trying to convey how concerned and serious he was by how fully he could keep his eyes open.

Neil thought of 46 days of being nothing. 46 days where the yawning emptiness inside of him felt like it was going to well up and drag him under until he was nothing more than a dead man walking.

He thought of the first time he stepped onto an Exy court for practice, when he felt his heart racing in his chest and realized it was the first strong emotion he’d felt outside of fear and anger in years.

Having a panic attack in the locker room before his first game, feeling his mother’s blows against his skin even though she was dead and burned and bones buried in the sand of a beach.

The victory of his first goal and realizing that striker what better than backliner had ever been.

He remembered being clapped on the back by his teammates and invitations to parties that he could never accept. Feeling _real_ and _seen_ for the first time since his mother had died. Locking into position as a light particle and not fizzing out the moment someone looked away.

He remembered spending a whole day panicking and then stepping onto the court and feeling it all settle. Because at least on the court he knew exactly who he was and what he was doing and why people were watching him.

The question “So?” was out of his mouth before he could stop it. Because it had never been about him loving Exy or Exy loving him back. Exy didn’t need to love him back. Neil wasn’t sure he had ever been loved back in his life. But Exy was the only reason that he was alive. It was what made him into a real person and the only part of his identity that he was sure of. Loving him back wasn’t the point. Exy had already done more for him than someone like Nicky would ever understand. When he had been lost and alone and empty, it had been _something_.

He would still die alone. Dying was never something he had been able to _want_, but it also wasn’t exactly something he dreaded. Running was what he had been trained to do, so it was what he did. With Exy, though, he thought he might be sad, there at the end, as the last of his life drained away.

He thought maybe his death would matter now, if not to anyone but himself.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading. Thank you to everyone who is a new reader or who returned to read something I wrote after years of radio silence. Real life has been an absolute disaster and a half over the past few years, but with the help of therapy, medication, and time management, I'm starting to find my feet again. Hopefully I'll be back to writing semi-regularly now.
> 
> I love Neil so much, and I hope I did him justice with this. Let me know what you thought! Reviews mean the world to me.


End file.
